The most powerful safety app for today’s world. Download Citizen to feel safer at home or out, get real-time safety alerts and live video of incidents happening near you, updates on natural disasters or protests, and know if your loved ones are near a dangerous incident.
Citizen notifications have urged people to evacuate burning buildings, deterred school buses from nearby terrorist attacks and have even led to a rescue of a 1-year-old from a stolen car. Citizen may notify you of a crime in progress before the police have responded. It’s meant to protect you and your community — please use it responsibly.
NEW! See friends on your Safety Map: Know their safety status in a glance and find out if (and when) they are near a dangerous incident in real-time. You can turn on Ghost Mode to keep your location private at any time.
Real-time Safety Alerts: Location-based notifications help you avoid potentially dangerous situations.
Live Breaking Video: Watch live video of an incident unfold from different angles or broadcast live from the scene.
Keep Your Community Safe: Report incidents right when they happen to protect the people around you.
Citizen also offers the Protect subscription, to help protect you and your loved ones. You can read the Terms of Use here: https://citizen.com/privacy/protect-supplemental-tos
I do recommend this app for those who want to get an insight on what’s going on in the community. The only big complaint about this is how streaming incidents keeps losing connection within seconds. I use this quite often and at least half the time, it loses connection. Making it useless to stream what’s going on. Doesn’t appear to be my network since it works great outside the app. Would be nice to fix this so it rarely happens.
It’s good for what it is but a few complaints… 1 – I don’t want to see what is “trending” 200+ miles away when I open the app… 2 – they changed it with the last major update, but I liked it better when I could minimize the list of incidents below the map, you can’t anymore… 3 – my opinion, we should be able to rate the quality/content of videos people post and after so many negative rates, people should lose the privilege of posting videos. (I want to see the incident, not a face talking)
Can’t look up streets on the search bar. For example. I have an adress “Vermont and Pico Los Angeles” you’ll only get cities. When you click on a link sent by someone it only takes you to the “download app” section instead of opening up the actual accident. Also many times when you are looking for an specific accident you will not find it on a map no matter how close you zoom in. It will disappear. And randomly appear another day.
New update is complete trash. The giant explore section has to go. It covers up half the screen and is filled with useless stuff happening on the other side of the country. The way it was before this newest update is much better. It’s not even usable at this point. Please do away with this new UI completely and go back to how it used to be and perfect that version. WHY TF ARE THERE ADS ALL THE TIME NOW? EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT CITIZEN PROTECT, YOU DON’T NEED TO ADVERTISE IT
There’s no point, it rarely actually shows anything going on in my neighborhood and on top of that always shows things from across the country. I’m in Seattle, I could care less about police activity in new York or Chicago, yes that’s what shows on the homepage for “explore” The crappiness of the free version makes it so I’d never ever bother with the paid version.
I re-downloaded this app because I had it on my old phone and it was very helpful to me. however now it sucks, the large explore page that’s pointless and takes up half of the screen is so annoying. I’m not able to properly see what is actually happening around where I live because of all the useless info on other neighborhoods.
New update is annoying. Tiny map now instead of full screen and moving the map is difficult as the active alerts screen just pulls up after each scroll on the map. Take it back to full screen map and stop forcing the alert list to fullscreen and you’ll have 5 stars, otherwise a great app but that is extremely annoying and map is too small to be useful now.
Not happy. I had this app on my old phone and loved it! I got a new phone recently and finally decided to get the app again. What’s going on? Even though I gave you my address, I’m only seeing what’s happening in other cities miles & miles away. I can actually hear the sirens up in town, I’m seeing on FB there’s something happening in town, but there’s nothing on Citizen about it. I’m not getting notifications for anything even though I have notifications allowed. Extremely Disappointed.
“Unlock Citizen Protect for free” pops up every single time I open a notification. You guys are REALLY shoving this subscription down people’s throats and it’s incredibly annoying. I wouldn’t mind doing a sub if it was less than $10 monthly, but otherwise no. Also, the explore page is very useless: I need to see what is going on in my city and neghborhood, NOT what’s going on in a city 2,000 mi away. Do better.
5/4/22 – perhaps by the next UI update, Citizen will finally be rendered completely useless 👍. Barely half the screen is available to freely explore the map anymore & the lower shade repeatedly/intrusively pops up onto the map over & over w/ largely irrelevant information. Complete dumpster fire now. Fix it. 5/19/22 – new update, same UI problems. Absolute trash app at this point. They don’t listen to their community feedback, make changes nobody asked for, and don’t fix what’s broken.
The app used to be good but not so much anymore. The UI is a lot clunkier now that the map showing incidents is literally half of what it used to be and scrolling around is harder. Recent confirmed but minor incidents that were posted are now disappearing for some unknown reason and unconfirmed incidents are sticking around longer than they need to be. Used to be good but now trending towards the fake news/sensationalism reporting track… May be deleting soon because of this…
I like being notified about dangers going on in my neighborhood, state, or nation. What I don’t like is being notified for the winner of the Superbowl that has NOTHING to do with safety. I also really don’t like that this app frequently overwrites my default notification settings or creates new temporary notifications (for example for the Superbowl). On top of that, those notifications use new sounds I don’t recognize that give me a jumpscare that I have to go search for the sound source.
The new UI is a big step backwards. There is now a prominent “Explore” section taking up the bottom of the screen which shows useless information from around the country. I don’t need to know about road closures or fires 2000 miles away from me. It’s just clutter and not only is it useless but it seems they are now showing less of what I actually use the app for, incidents in my own neighborhood.
Uninstalling. The notifications on this app have gotten completely out of hand. They ignore your settings and add new custom sounds all the time. Just now I heard someone shout “touchdown!” from the other room and thought someone broke into my house, but it was just a citizen alert about the superbowl winner. What does that have to do with public safety anyway!? (Nothing). And that’s just the most recent example. Anyway, good riddance
With the recent update, in addition to the notification issues other users have experienced, I really don’t feel safe not being able to see events on the map older than an hour or two. If I’m going to a new neighborhood, I have always gone to Citizen to see what has happened there recently (the little white dots for expired alerts on the map) to know how safe it will be. Please bring these back to the default map view, in the name of safety.
App was fine months ago then a new update occurred and it deteriorated. The alerts aren’t in timely order and it doesn’t even show me what’s going on around a certain address. Not worth paying monthly fees when I can’t even see what’s going on around me. It used to even show me what was happening 12+ hours ago, now it’s like I have to watch the app 24/7 because the alerts delete after like 2 hours.
I guess the developers never heard of the phrase if it ain’t broke don’t fix it because this is the worst update I’ve ever seen. Huge downgrade to the old layout and no longer can you listen to the radio chatter of the police or the fire department and the notifications are ridiculous because you get notified of an incident that happens over 2000 miles away. Why would I care if there’s a fire in Florida when I live in California? Please go back to the old layout because I want to uninstall.
Got this app to be a little more aware of the city around me, but this thing is mare annoying than a free-to-play game! I’m getting push notifications for incidents that are MILES away, with no ability to adjust my radius. They push HARD for location services to be turned on at all times, and all that did was murder my battery. This developer should really work on making this more user friendly and giving users options.
Had this on my old phone and it worked great. Recently purchased a new phone, downloaded the app, and everything is changed. I don’t get any local updates of what is happening in my area. I get alerts for miles away and for every other major city across the country including NYC. Whose bright idea was it to change to this horrible, stupid upgrade. Just couldn’t leave well enough alone. The app is useless if I don’t know what is happening in my own area. I have deleted this worthless app!
My app stopped working recently – like, I’d get an alert but it would not open, and I’d never know what and where in my neighborhood is actually happening. (This has happened before, for weeks and even months at a time.) l uninstalled the app to start from scratch again. Well, this time I can’t even get logged in! I keep getting an error message after adding my 310 area code phone number to “add a US phone number”! Please fix whatever glitches you have going on.
Highly recommended by someone in my community. Great concept and seems to be well-liked and well-supported. However, after installing, I was shocked to see that 1) the monthly subscription was priced so high, and 2) my credit card information had already been staged to be charged after the 30-day trial. The latter is pretty heavy-handed. I believe in paying for good products that are well-supported. However, $49/month is 10 times too high, and beyond the reach of many. Uninstalled.
Good app but asks for far too many permissions so I have not installed it on my tablets. Absolutely no reason for this app to have access to all your contacts or all your photos. Perfect to install on a phone you don’t use regularly in case you want to know what’s going on in your neighborhood. Uninstalled after monthly charge began.
It would be nice if you had the option to change the map settings For example, on Google maps you can change the map to street view. Sometimes when I can see the street, i can better understand the area otherwise. The app is perfect. Really kept me up-to-date on crime happening In in my neighborhood.
Watched a car get hit and filp upsude down outside my house. Ended up being a pretty big deal with crowds and such. Not a single notification about it. The same goes for shootings and most major activity. I only get notifications for things that happened days ago and are farther away from me. Why bother having a free version if its not capable of doijg the one thing we need it to?
The concept is great. The alerts not so much. I have set areas surrounding to be alerted on and I still end up getting alerts from across town at 2am. Jarring. It also gets kinda creepy with friend location, so you end up using ghost mode a lot. The app is clumsy to navigate, and some buttons are not obvious what they do. A few of them I haven’t touched for fear of going live. It is difficult to sort out the noise from the relevant and incidents aren’t always chronological.
After using for a few weeks I can say it needs a bit of work. The first thing they should do is add a feedback link so users can help to improve the product. You can send feedback by navigating through the help system and sending an email, but a link to a dedicated feedback system with drop down menus and comment section would be very useful. Second, the notifications are hit or miss. I open the app and see a few incidents listed, but never received any notification. Also, if I click the bell(notifications) it has different incidents than are on the home page. Also, there are no filters for which notifications you receive, like distance(radius), type, time of day(maybe). I have not used their Protect connect feature yet, but it should be set up with the connect button on your home screen, always available, instead of in the app. If stuff is going down, I don’t want to have to be finding the connect button. Third, the connect feature pricing is kind of high at $20.00 per month. How often are most people going to be using it? Hopefully never, but probably rarely. Also, it frequently stops working and I have to restart it to get the latest incidents. It is a good concept, but needs improvement and a lower price for connect feature.
I like this app, it helps me to stay updated and aware of what’s going on in my neighborhood which allows me to adjust my commute to avoid trouble. If I may make a suggestion – please change notification sound every time there’s COVID update, it sounds very alarming and I assume that something huge happened, but instead it’s just same old annoying statistics. Other than that, very useful and comprehensive app.
When the app was first released, it worked beautifully – but lately it’s absolutely horrible. Constant freezing, forced restarts etc. It’ not even worth the effort any longer. I can use various scanner apps to monitor calls in my community, of which many (unfortunately) are of a serious nature and never appear on Citizen. if you’re going to do it, do it right or move aside for someone who will.
VIDEO PLAYBACK SUCKS!!! The videos that are posted only play back a few seconds and then stop. It happens with all videos in any event that has them. THE APP NEEDS TO BE FIXED. Other than that its mostly informative about events in the immediate area. Update: I got in touch with tech support and even they couldn’t figure out what it wrong. So it STILL SUCKS.
This last update really broke the app and has made it unusable on my Android phone. Every time I open it I hear the sound of a video playing, but it is behind the window and I can’t get to it to shut it up. It’s the same video every time. Then when I go to read one of the posts it closes it ad jumps back to the main window after a few seconds or less. This makes it impossible to read the posts. This was especially bad because all of the emergency information for Austin during this winter storm was in those posts but I couldn’t read them.
Not a bad idea, but it’s buggy as hell, sometimes can’t find my location when other apps can, sometimes notifications work, sometimes they don’t, I don’t have the option to see what’s going on in some nearby communities until I’m there, and the moderation of the comments section is total garbage. Edit: after the last update, the amp’s a mess. Thumbnail pics of 2 day old crimes cover up incidents currently happening, events are disappearing and reappearing on the map. Uninstalled.
Ok I LOVE this app! HOWEVER… it has some major downfalls/ missed opportunities. Where it falls short is that you should be able to sort the incidents how you see fit (i.e. most recent, verified, type of incident, etc). It also doesn’t show 80% of the incidents until you zoom EXTREMELY far in. And you should be able to scan through areas outside of your own for people who travel/ commute outside of their immediate area.
in my experience this App has been very helpful. As an example, just last night there was a police chase 4 blocks from my home with over 10 squad cars looking for a suspect. It’s nice to know what’s going on close by so we can be more aware On other occasions, we’ve been alerted to major car accidents which were blocking freeways, and causing delays in traffic. This is extremely helpful in the Bay Area, where traffic is a constant concern.
The app was amazing until after the update. Now, there’s just way too many things going on in the screen and I keep accidently pressing something and all I’m trying to do is move around the map. On the home screen, make it simple, just the map… make tabs… not put everything into 1 home page and expect my fat fingers to tip toe through the screen.
This app USED to be great. Loved it. I live in a big city, it helped a lot when working nights. However, all this app does now is covid 🙄 No other alerts. Nothing updates appropriately, it pushes the ‘get contact tracing’ bs way too much. Wrong locations. I actually turned off using the location services outside of the app due to both contact tracing and inaccurate locations all the time. It was so much better months ago.
Not much info in my area. Even though we had hundreds of calls for emergency aid, just showed two events. The photos and videos submitted were terrible quality. Usually a person holding their phone in the car and the pictures were more dashboard and window shots than the actual emergency. Now my last gripe. Why the heck does it cost $20 a month. Netflix isn’t that much. I say $20 a year or $1.99 per month. When you drop your prices please look me up. I’m willing to try the app again.
The user interface kinda sucks. It would be a more bearable if the main map detailing incidents would stay put when trying to move the map around. If you try to drag the map left or right, the map toggles to the additional screens left and right, cause you to lose the map and your place on it. It’s very redundant to have this swiping feature when right at the bottom of the map there are buttons to toggle the different screens. Other than that, it does what it says.
After using it lightly for years, just found out there’s no free option. I’d keep it if there was an ad supported version or if they made certain features require payment (like viewing audio and video). But by going to a fee only model most people won’t use the app and won’t provide the info that made the app useful. Good luck. I’m done. Uninstalled.
While I like the app in principle, it needs a lot more features and selectivity to be useful. I don’t need to be constantly bombarded with alerts from areas I never go to but the app considers “nearby”. I don’t need stories about car or house fires, but there’s no option to turn notices off. I would return if and only if the free version of the app had a good filter that let me select the area I’m interested in following.
This app is great! I see a couple other people mentioned the GPS. I have a galaxy phone and it asks me if I want to keep location always on or only while I use the app. The GPS not only tracks where you currently are, but anywhere you go so you dont have to enter in addresses all the time. You do have an option to enter in address to see reports in other area. You can also navigate around the city and state by moving the map around and zooming in or out. Only had for 7 hours now and I love it
Used to be great, now sucks! Impossible to re-install! Keeps sending duplicate verification codes via text, then attempts to also send verification codes to the correct e-mail address, however they never make it! When you toggle/switch screens between the app & text messaging, e-mail, citizen app reverts back to text message verification, and you get the same code numbers 2ce for each instance where you’re required to request a code. You’ve got to be kidding me! This is ridiculous! It’s a loop!
New UI is awful. Integrating the media with the factual updates means that all videos must load just to get the official information, which significantly slows down the app. Also, clicking in the map circle zooms to show your location and the incident, which means you have to zoom all the way back in to the location to see which intersection it’s at. This is unnecessary because most viewers live in and know the city they’re viewing and don’t need their relative location highlighted.
Useful for finding out about crimes and emergencies nearby. However, I find the new UI confusing and hard to navigate. Also, the locations of incidents are always listed by the name of the neighborhood, not the city. Most of the neighborhood names in my area are obscure and no one uses them. I have to zoom the map out to see where the incident is located. City and street names would be much more useful.
There’s been so many changes to the app design that, so many things that were important and of use on the app are no longer available. Updates on what’s going on in your area has changed drastically. Your area looks “safe” on the map yet, the gunshot/fireworks detectors never show up in the areas that gunshots happen. Adding family before, you can see their location and message them. No use in adding anymore. Don’t waste money on a app that’s now broken. Most reviews are old and not up to date.
As a service, it’s wonderful and the mission and purpose is amazing. As an app, it’s unusable to me because it doesn’t have light mode, only dark mode, and that hurts my eyes and makes it barely visible out in the sunlight. I don’t see many apps do this, usually they have both light and dark depending on user preference. Either way, good service but I’d never be able to use it unless theming options become available. Hope to see this app around in the future! Great idea.
I guess this app might be useful if you live inside the limits of a large..ish city. If you live in rural area, from what I can tell, there’s no info whatsoever. So, totally useless for me. Or maybe I need to adjust some settings… Oh wait, there aren’t any to adjust. Great idea and concept.. failed on the delivery.
It’s a great idea for an app, but I just installed it yesterday and I’m already being bombarded with notifications with no options to narrow or change what I’m seeing. If I could only see notifications for things happening in a mile or 2 radius, that would be great! I don’t need notifications for things happening 10 miles away
The layout now is HORRIBLE! U don’t have the option as before with what u choose to look for at the bottom now there’s only 2 buttons to choose from Which makes this app not Interesting! It’s hard to find what you’re looking for now. The original layout should’ve been left alone & just updated the look of the buttons. If u allow the users to record a emergency U shouldn’t allow the Camera/ Videos that are Shaking it makes it Hard To see what’s going on Especially for a person that has Seizures.
Have repeatedly asked that the map of my area be updated. So far, after multiple requests, still nothing. They keep saying the maps come from a 3rd party source. Doesn’t help of the map isn’t current. And the new upgrade SUCKS! If I want crime from other cities I can look it up. Now I get less local and more from far away. It really sucks.
Inconvenient app. Unless u have all the time in the world. It was pretty cool before, when they had all the videos together, and u could just scroll up. Now u have to go item by item, to view the videos. Very inconvenient for a single mom. We don’t have that kind of time to spare. I’m assuming they made it this way now, so people can pay to watch the feeds. Not going to spend money to SEE if that’s the case. No thank u. Quality is what brings quantity! I’m sure I’m not the only one deleting.
There are a lot of dark patterns when setting up the app. (Dark patterns are created using intentionally misleading UI design.) For example, at the beginning, they highlight the bold “Start Trial” button yet you have the option, in tiny letters, to just skip that step. You don’t need to subscribe to the 30-day trial! Also, this app isn’t helpful if you live in a safe, non-major city such as LA, NYC or Chicago.
It just never works. Really want to like it but it’s practically not usable. Notifies me of things in other cities, half of the screen is random things happening far away. I always have my location on, spouse does too and it will show us in other parts of town when we are legit right next to each other. I like that you can click on the dots to get more information and see where reports are happening real time but unfortunately it just doesn’t work well enough for me to keep it.
I wish there were minus stars. There’s now ads, which weren’t there before, and they make it impossible to continue without closing the app and going back in. Sometimes numerous times. I wish I would have never updated to the latest version. It sucks! I’ve since deleted it, so there goes my local crime alerts. What a shame they screw things up for no reason. Please ad the old version back on the play store.
I get a message that says “We’ve updated the News Tabs”. “Swipe up to see more videos”. Well it doesn’t swipe up. It jams my Android phone, it doesn’t close and I have to reboot. I uninstalled this app twice and it made no difference. What an inconvenience to jam my phone in a non responsive window. I’m not liking the improvements with the bugs. The version I have is 0.1048.1
Citizen used to be great but with the latest update it is cluttered with COVID contract tracing information that cannot be disabled in the UI. I used to get a lot of push notifications and now I randomly get them, if at all. You should be able to disable the Contract Tracing UI that’s above everything else. Also, hitting the back button on the action bar now closes the app rather than going back a screen.
This app is starting to genuinely frustrate me, I can’t even open the app or view any of the alerts that I get because it stays stuck on the map “loading” and saying error. I’ve uninstalled the app, turned on and off my WiFi, which is pretty good, yet it still refuses to work. I don’t know what was added to this app, but I’ve been having issues with it around late May to early June
Used it for all of 2 minutes. Wouldn’t do a thing without my location even though I have it a nearby address and enables location only while using app. Annoying ads trying to get you to buy bs services which likely will be difficult to end. If you want to give free trials, do it right by trusting your service is exemplary enough that people will but them without forcing a credit card before evaluation.
The app only gives me notifications occasionally. I’ve tried Un-installing and making sure permissions are set, but I still have the issue.. other then that, I love that the official 911 calls are recorded so you can hear and confirm it’s not just someone reporting hearing “gunshots” when it’s clearly fireworks.. really do appreciate the app and it’s nice to know what goes on around your area.
It’s really, REALLY glitchy and hard to use. Doesn’t respond well to touch, despite pressing certain buttons. Shows me the same footage over and over but I can’t change to a new area, or explore the app. Theoretically, could be an awesome app… But I think it still has a lot more work to be done before it can be used as intended.
The recent update to the app has destroyed what made the app so great. I get that you want to centralize things to where the end user is, but now it’s so difficult to see what’s happening around the city so we can alert those who may be within imminent danger. Please revert to the old setup and perhaps have an option for the user to set feed by distance, time, and saved neighborhoods. There has been a large number of users saying the same thing so I hope the change will come. Thank you.